Aotearoa New Zealand history with Dr Vincent O'Malley and occasional guest contributors

Sunday, 1 November 2015

Book Review: Tony Ballantyne, "Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Māori, and the Question of the Body"

In
August 1837, a group of Anglican missionaries belonging to the Church
Missionary Society (CMS) assembled at Waimate, one of their stations in
the Bay of Islands, in northern New Zealand. There the party proceeded
to torch a cottage, destroying the property within it and even shooting
dead a horse. A week of prayer and fasting followed. The unfortunate
horse’s owner, William Yate, had been dismissed from the CMS months
earlier, following allegations of an inappropriate relationship with one
of the crew on board the Prince Regent
during its journey from England to New Zealand a year earlier. That in
turn had resulted in several Māori male youths coming forward to testify
that Yate had engaged in sex acts with them.

Yate was hardly the first or last missionary to fall from grace, even
within New Zealand. Yet as Tony Ballantyne argues in his new work, a
close reading of Yate’s case has often been framed in terms of questions
of sexual identity rather than the broader context of his dealings with
other missionaries and Māori. Although Yate portrayed himself as a
victim of injustice (and that image was largely upheld in historian
Judith Binney’s work on the missionary), Ballantyne paints a much darker
portrait of the man, whose ego alienated him from missionary colleagues
and who, according to this new account, almost certainly coerced,
bullied, or misled multiple Māori boys into their various sexual
encounters.[1]

This provocative and challenging new reading of the Yate story is one
of many incidents to feature in Ballantyne’s account of the place of
the body in missionary and Māori exchanges in northern New Zealand
between 1814 (when the first mission station was established) and 1840,
when the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi heralded entry into
the formal British Empire. Yet Ballantyne’s focus is neither exclusively
sexual nor unduly restrictive. Employing a broad sweep of bodily
practices and exchanges allows Ballantyne to examine many aspects of
everyday Māori and missionary interactions. After a period of relative
neglect, this is a topic that has been of keen interest to New Zealand
historians in recent times.

Ballantyne tackles contending missionary and Māori understandings of
such matters as space, labor, sex, and death, with considerable insight
and ability. Arguably he overstates the novelty of his overarching
argument that we should view these interactions as forms of
“entanglement” rather than “meetings” or “encounters.” It is a notion
well established in Pacific historiography thanks to the work of
Nicholas Thomas (and also one referenced in my own study of pre-1840 New
Zealand).[2] In any case, the preferred metaphor is ultimately less
significant than the substance it is intended to convey, and here
Ballantyne’s work sits comfortably within the recent historiography that
overturns earlier depictions of missionaries overcoming initial hazards
and trials to eventually triumph over heathen “natives.”

To the extent that the concept of “conversion” has any validity at
all, such a process was never straightforward, with both parties
influencing each other. As Ballantyne describes it, the missionaries did
not, and could not, carve out “little Englands” for themselves but
instead were confronted by Māori with their own cultural priorities and
practices. The world of missionaries and Māori was one of constant
“translation, compromise, and struggle” (p. 97). In spatial terms,
missionaries were nearly always required to live where Māori told
them—sometimes in accordance with Māori cultural preferences (especially
in the earliest phase, when multiple families might be forced to live
under the same roof, Māori-style, and without segregation of the sexes).

For Māori, work was outcome-focused and dictated by the wider needs
of the community, whereas missionaries viewed the act of laboring as an
inherent good in its own right. The result was that Māori worked on
their own terms and in their own time, disappointing initial missionary
hopes (led by Sydney chaplain Samuel Marsden) that “civilization” was a
potential path to evangelization. Death and disease were ever-present
realities for both Māori and missionary families in the era before 1840.
In a striking analysis, Ballantyne calculates that missionary wives
were especially vulnerable, dying on average some thirty years younger
than their husbands. But interring and commemorating the dead was a
complicated process in a land lacking consecrated cemeteries.
Missionaries frequently had to make do in the early days by burying
their wives, children, or colleagues in their own gardens. Meanwhile,
Māori notions of tapu (sacred or subject to ceremonial restrictions) were not lightly defied.

Māori might have retained the upper hand locally, but Ballantyne
argues that they could not control how they were represented in European
texts. By the late 1830s, this became crucial as the British government
contemplated further intervention in New Zealand and found itself to a
large degree reliant on information supplied by missionaries and other
“respectable” eyewitnesses for its understanding of what was happening
on the ground. As the missionaries became increasingly gloomy as to the
prospect of preventing significant colonization altogether, many
concluded that there was no alternative to British annexation of New
Zealand. That view increasingly influenced and clouded their reports,
transforming Māori from the “hypermasculine” and martial people of James
Cook’s time into weak and vulnerable victims of European contact.
Colonization, at least in the missionary and humanitarian worldview, was
to proceed cautiously and in tandem with the protection of Māori
interests. Inevitably (although it is not a particular focus of
Ballantyne’s work) the latter of these two incompatible objectives would
eventually give way.

Considering its focus on the body, some matters might have merited
more attention. Ballantyne registers missionary abhorrence of
such practices as prostitution, cannibalism, and infanticide but fails
to explore how Māori might have viewed these in any kind of sustained
way. Given recent sensationalist accounts of Māori cannibalism
especially, a careful and scholarly reappraisal of this topic would have
been particularly timely.

There is the occasional slip. Abel Tasman did not name his discovery
“Zeelandia Nova” but “Staten Landt” (the new name came later, inserted
by Dutch cartographers after their own province of Zeeland). Overall,
however, this is a work of considerable depth and value. In arguing that
“entanglements of empire before 1840 neither destroyed Māori culture
nor left it untouched,” Ballantyne seeks to challenge the view of
unconstrained Māori agency while at the same time rejecting older “Fatal
Impact” analyses (p. 257). Debate over the extent to which Māori were
in control of their own destinies in this era remains a lively (and at
times politically charged) affair, because it informs wider arguments
about the context in which the Treaty of Waitangi was entered.
Ballantyne’s work will in the future be essential reading for anyone
wishing to understand and engage in this discussion.